


Rise

by cher



Category: Craft Sequence - Max Gladstone
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 05:13:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2800832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cher/pseuds/cher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deep in the night, when only the desperate and the holy are awake, the city echoes strangely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stoatsandwich](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stoatsandwich/gifts).



> Thanks to NightsMistress for beta assistance.

A buggy driver in Alt Coulumb sees too much.

Deep in the night, when only the desperate and the holy are awake, the city echoes strangely. The drivers know it, and the newer ones fear it, but the veteran drivers are the ones who grow to love it.

A buggy driver, alone of Alt Coulumb's citizens, is both desperate and holy. Justice's Blacksuits came close, once; desperate by day and holy by night. Or desperate in plainclothes and something like holy elsetimes.

Nowadays, the Blacksuits as they were are gone. Perhaps they are holier now that Seril Green-Eyed, Seril Undying, is alive again. Perhaps not. Seril's Children, the Stone Men, fly the rooftops again and their claws cut poetry into the stones. The Blacksuits are no longer one mind, and the rumour runs through the city that they are more terrible now than ever before; that their dead and returned Goddess's new compassion is worse than Justice's cold implacability.

There are no newspapers in Alt Coulumb, but if there were, the buggy drivers could write them all. They could tell of the midnight whispers of skeletons in rustling cloth and clicking bone, who marvelled that it should be a Goddess-touched Craftswoman and a junkie Blacksuit who brought the Blacksuits back from the brink of madness. They know the movements of the ships and cargoes in the docks, the snap and sway of sweat and more exchanged in the bars, the manoeuvring of cardinals and technicians in the temple. They know the quietest of the contracts that slide into place in the hands of the Craftswomen, binding and sealing hearts and souls. The city is always theirs, but in the hours of the small dark, it is theirs most of all.

In these hours the daylight city sleeps, while Lord Kos touches hearts and dreams, the Pleasure Quarter simmers with life, Craftsmen and Craftswomen work their Craft, and the cabs and buggies still run.

Drivers carry everyone who has the soulstuff to pay. They hear too much. The lusts of vampires, the glasslike chime of demon's speech, the clear pronouncements of priests too sure of their own importance to guard their voices.

The city reels, still, in the knowledge that God died. The night belongs to Seril, but it is slow to return to Her. Lord Kos' fire burns in the hearts of his people, but it is a changed flame. There is, for more citizens than might care to admit it, a sting to the burn.

The people of Alt Coulumb have known for a generation now that their belief in the eternal is a fiction, a lie of the blackest sort. Their gods could fall; the world could change overnight. Seril Undying was no more, and her body mutilated, a puppet to a Craftsman with the blood of stars congealing in his veins. The shock of realisation is there in the echo of these small hours, reverberating around this city still. Perhaps it will never leave.

The drivers know it, and follow the reverb where it leads. It's a special kind of grace, driving the city. It isn't the cold fire of the Craft, nor the warming flame of Lord Kos, nor Seril Green-Eyed's power in the moonlight. The knowledge of the city is peculiar to the drivers, and the horses who pull their own cabs. Since no one asks the horses, it is the drivers alone who can divine the city's voice.

Tara Abernathy's arrival hit the city with the force of a fierce summer squall. Alt Coulumb rang with her presence, for those with ears to hear. And in three days she resurrected Lord Kos and Seril Undying, changed the leadership of the Church of Kos, and brought the Stone Men back to the skies. To the city, it mattered only a little that Tara had the help of its own in her work.

Tara knew, inside of her first week in Alt Coulumb, that the buggy drivers could answer any question she might care to ask about _who_ , or _when_ , or most especially, _where_. The trick, of course, was in changing "could" into "would". It was curiously hard to sway a driver with Craft. It could be done, of course, but much of the inexplicable knowledge Tara wanted seemed to bleed away with the touch of her Craft.

Instead, she learned to ride along in the small hours as well, up front with the drivers. Sunk in the quiet, sometimes the echoes and eddies in the city speak directly to her, the knowledge in the stones and sea settling into her bones. Some nights her skin hardens against Alt Coulumb's soul and there is nothing for it but to cajole the information she seeks out of her driver. In the small hours, the drivers seem subtly changed, more of the city, less of themselves. It reminds Tara of Cat immediately after removing the Blacksuit; herself, yet part of Justice. Suggestible, and yet quite the opposite at the same time.

Slowly, Tara learns Kos' city, Adelard's city, Cat's city. They're different and the same. Cat can hear the echoes as well when she tries, but Abelard's inner ear is tuned too closely to his Lord Kos to hear any other voice. Still, the buggy drivers become used to the three of them, nights passing into daylight with one or the other of them sitting silently in the passenger's chair. They pay like any traveler, and they are less trouble than most.

Usually.

Tara is sometimes enormous trouble, and Cat no better. Sometimes, where Tara treads explosions and fire follow, and Cat _will_ order the drivers on wild chases. There is so much work to be done before Alt Coulumb can settle back into itself. Seril's Children are in the air, on the rooftops, and the stones sing again. The slumbering masses still fear them, and that was Alexander Denovo's doing. Tara feels responsible, and the city itself, formed of a thousand years of loves and hopes and dreams of its citizens - divine, profane, holy, desperate and everything in between - is full of something that hits the back of Tara's throat like guilt.

Alt Coulumb wants its Goddess and her Children back, but a generation's fear and hatred don't disappear with a moment's illumination. The Church and its God want to trust one another again, but betrayal on the scale they have seen are not quickly forgotten. Despite it all, the city knows itself, and with what Tara learns from the drivers who see too much, she leans to know Alt Coulumb too. Tara learns, perhaps, to love it.

The buggy drivers see the way the echoes bend around her, and know that Tara will leave Alt Coulumb, but that she will always return.


End file.
